Sifton, by the way, was not named after Sir Clifford Sifton, but his uncle, who derived salt from the springs near Lake Winnipegosis, which had partially supplied the population long before a steam whistle disturbed the prairies’ peace.
“Service” was our motto. We had more stopping places to the ten miles, I think, than any railway in the world. Only a few of them were on the time table. Over most of the route, where settlement was beginning, we put down and took up passengers and way freight to suit our patrons’ pleasure. For seventy-two miles, between Plumas and Dauphin, we hadn’t a telegraph station.
It wasn’t of us, but it might have been, that this story was told: Certain passengers of a railway through ill-settled bush country observed the train stop at Nowhere, and saw a woman come from a cabin in a clearing and speak to the conductor. She returned to the cabin, and the train stood so long that an explanation was sought from the conductor.
“Oh,” he said, “that’s all right. This lady goes to market every Saturday with us, to sell her eggs. This morning she’s one short of two dozen. We’re waiting because one of the hens is on.”
Our time for the one hundred and twenty miles from Portage to Dauphin with a mixed train, was six and a half hours. Though punctuality was occasionally more of an ambition than an achievement, we kept good time on the whole; thanks to the driving of Billy Walker and the whole-souled devotion to business of Dad Risteen. We didn’t have an express service of our own, except so far as everything was express. But each train had a couple of brakemen, and Dad made it his business to know all about all the way freight that had to be unloaded at each stop; and he would hang in and help his brakemen unload.
The two nights a week on which the train came into Dauphin saw a big crowd in waiting at the station. Sometimes immigrants received a too flattering impression of the importance attached to their arrival.
The superintendent almost lived on the line in those days, and sometimes he helped in handling traffic. Dad Risteen, after he had taken up his tickets, and pored over the way bills, would come into the second of our complete passenger equipment of two second-hand coaches, and say, his face beaming like a rising sun, “Mr. Hanna, we’re having a good day to-day. She’s carrying five hundred and forty-three dollars.”
Across more than a quarter of a century I take off my hat to Dad Risteen, for as whole-hearted, diligent, able and enthusiastic a fellow-worker as ever railway chief had.
The same is true of the engineers. Billy Walker drove the engine, and “Joe Beef” hostlered it in the little frame roundhouse across the Vermilion river at Dauphin, until there was work for him also on the road.